WHISPERING SMITH: The butcher, the baker and the candlestick maker...

Chris Adam Smith

Carl Lee, a man with close ties to Littlehampton, last week posed the question on Flashback Wick Littlehampton area’s Facebook page: Name a business that has closed from your younger years?

I do not know if he was surprised by the response but I certainly was – at last count more than 300 people had posted a reply.

Inevitably there was much duplication and questions asked rather than answers given but, on the whole, it jogged a lot of memories and painted a rather sad, bleak picture of a small town’s shopping centre largely decimated by out-of-town supermarkets and the internet.

One of those very recently closed being a favourite of mine was Booker’s the shoe repair shop in Arcade Road.

Familiar shops such as Woolworths were much lamented, as was the loss of the three cinemas – an Odeon, Regent and Palladium – along with a depressing list of public houses many in which I knew quite well.

The Albion, The Marine, The Globe, The Britannia, The Gratwick and The Terminus pub where my dad, a train guard, spent a lot of his off-duty time, to name just a few.

The cafes have also vanished, the Clifton, Dora’s and Station Café were the first establishments train visitors saw are now bland blocks of flats and a building site where The Locomotive once stood.

Long gone are butchers Dewhurst’s, Joyce and Caffyn’s and the Oxley fish shop – happily now replaced along the river by Riverside Fish.

Now we have estate agents, charity shops, bargain shops, large chemists, vape shops and a plethora of hairdressers. Something somewhere has gone horribly wrong and the variety of outlets sadly diminished.

There have been a few on the plus side and I will offer them up next week.